Visual display devices are well known and include cinematic film projectors, television sets, monitors, plasma displays, liquid crystal display LCD televisions, monitors, and projectors etc. Such devices are often employed to present images or image sequences to viewer.
The field of backlighting began in the 1960s due to the fact that televisions require a “darker” room for optimal viewing. Backlighting is in its simplest form white light, emitted from e.g. a light bulb, projected on a surface behind the visual display device. Backlighting has been suggested to be used to relax the iris and reduce eyestrain.
During recent years the backlighting technology has become more sophisticated and there are several display devices on the market with integrated backlighting features that enables emitting colors with different brightness depending on the visual information presented on the display device.
The benefits of backlighting in general includes: a deeper and more immersive viewing experience, improved color, contrast and detail for best picture quality, and reduced eye strain for more relaxed viewing. Different advantages of backlighting require different settings of the backlighting system. Reduced eye strain may require slow changing colors and a more or less fixed brightness while more immersive viewing experience may require an extension of the screen content i.e. the same brightness changes with the same speed as the screen content.
EP 1551 178 A1 discloses a supplementary visual display system for use in conjunction with a display device including an image display region for presenting images to a viewer. The display system comprises one or more illumination sources that at least partially peripherally surround the image display region. A drawback of the system of the publication is that it does not enable both relaxed and immersive viewing experience simultaneously.
Backlighting television sets generally include several templates, such as Relaxed, Moderate, and Dynamic templates with predefined settings. Choosing a Relaxed mode gives a slowly responding backlighting effect and thus provides a relaxed backlighting background while watching the content. A disadvantage of the templates, especially the Relaxed mode, is that the setting is fixed over time. Accordingly, in case of the Relaxed mode, the backlighting effect changes very slowly, but this is also the case when there is a sudden action, such as a scene change, in the image content. Slowly changing backlighting within a scene is not a problem since there is a correlation between the color fading out and the current color. However, the problem becomes apparent when both the color and brightness, e.g. going from a very bright to a very dark scene, differences of two subsequent scenes are great. In current backlighting implementations a previous bright scene may overwhelm the new scene for seconds.
Hence, an improved visual display system, method, apparatus and computer readable medium would be advantageous.